Immortality
by TJ Dragonblade
Summary: Hidan realizes immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. Gen. Warning for graphic gore.


From the prompt 'Hidan - Immortality' on the Angst round at Naruto_Meme and also tailored to the 'Torture' theme on Naruto_Contest, both on LJ

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It starts to set in once he realizes that the seasons have cycled through five times, and he's _still stuck in this fucking pit_.

Five years. _Five years_ he's been buried down here in so many pieces he can't count them all, can't even be sure he feels them all. It's safe to assume Kakuzu isn't around anymore; if he was, Hidan would've been found and excavated and stitched back together by now. But if those Konoha brats managed to defeat him, he's forced to admit there's a good chance they went through all of Kakuzu's hearts too. And probably the rest of the Akatsuki, which means there's no one left to even think about looking for him.

He's stuck. Trapped. Smeared and squished and splattered in this pit, immobile and incapacitated forever.

Literally, forever.

He's going to be conscious and helpless and strewn about and crushed and _aware_ and it's _never fucking going to end_.

He'd scream his rage, if his throat and lungs and mouth weren't wedged into fourteen separate places in the pit. He'd curse and yell and call down unholy retribution on the one who's done this to him, who's rendered him impotent, who's _neutralized_ him this way.

He'd send silent prayers to his god, if he thought it would do any good, but Jashin isn't known for his mercy-especially to those who've failed him.

~*~  
There is an up-side to all this, he realizes after six years. He doesn't have to put up with Deidara's insufferable annoyances anymore, doesn't have to put up with that babbling idiot Tobi or Itachi's damned broody superiority or any of the rest of it ever again. But it's hardly worth it. A pulpy mess buried in a pit can't _do_ anything, no matter how willful and furious and aware he is. He can't live and fight and kill, can't offer holy sacrifice to his god, can't make his bloody mark in the world. His existence will never end, and the world will never even know he's still there.

It's enough to make a man crazy.

~*~  
After nine years, he thinks crazy might be a relief from the monotony. Nothing changes, nothing happens, nothing _matters_.

And it hurts. It _really_ fucking hurts, being blown up and blended in with all this rock and dirt, and there's no pleasure left in the pain after this long. There are worms burrowing through his torn intestines, bugs of all kinds nesting in so many of his bits and pieces, things with teeth eating away at his scattered fingers _there_ and _there_ and over _there_ too. He can feel his flesh being chewed up, digested, excreted; it's disgusting and beautiful and he can only hope it maybe pleases Jashin somehow, that his failure is punished so fittingly.

He would laugh, if his mouth and throat and lungs weren't in more than forty places by now.

~*~  
He starts losing count after twenty years have gone by, when both eyes and most of his brain have been eaten out of what's left of his skull and so much of his flesh has been digested and re-deposited further and further away and he _can still feel it_ and _still can't do anything_, when he thinks he's more earth than man; he's never been normal, never been mundane, but this is just a fucking _insane_ way to exist and he finds himself praying for madness to take him.

~*~  
He has no idea how long he's been here by the time the worms and rodents and whatever else stop eating away at him, when there's nothing left that they haven't already devoured. He thinks, not one bit sorry for the blasphemy, that he never would have pledged his life to Jashin if he'd known it would end up like this. He's composted flesh and splintered bits of bone and he doesn't understand how his awareness and sensory perception can remain when his physical form has been so thoroughly destroyed, but he's _still there_, and still _trapped_, and his longed-for madness always hovers on the periphery of his awareness, forever just beyond his non-existent reach.


End file.
